Hacking my painting skills.
Pros and Cons
It’s time to distill some hobby moonshine by breaking down the successes and failures of my previous projects.
Tempest Hawks Primaris Marines

Pros:
- Yellow helmets and green lenses are very
eye catching close up. - The white areas stand out due to the darker
resesses in the panel lining. - Breaking up the backpack with the red helped to keep the illusion of the two
colour paint scheme. - The plasma effect is solid.

Cons:
- I estimate the layering, panel lining, highlights and freehand took 3 – 4 hours per model.
- A quick test of both colour schemes on Instagram showed I gained more likes for a 1-hour-and-done Iron Warrior.
- The quartered scheme is obscured on the battlefield.
- The squad marking transfers in all Space Marine boxes are
white, if I’d inverted my colour scheme I could have transfers rather than painting the symbol on. - Textured paints are great at quickly basing models that would otherwise require lots of PVA glue and paint but require lots of extra layers when you need to cover a large area.
Blanchitsu Stormcast Eternals

Pros:
- Being held accountable and getting a reward (however small) ensured I actually completed the project in the 3-month time span.
- Spraying Leadbelcher and then using a wash cut with Lahmian Medium worked great in getting a nice metal finish.
- Small stones glued to the bases helped them stand out.
- Pigment rubbed into their armour and on their bases made the models stand out for little work.
Cons:
- The livery needed an extra colour (possibly gold) to make it really pop.
- Applying a single
coloured pigment over a textured base didn’t work as expected. It needs more layers to work correctly. - I still don’t play Age of Sigmar and therefore these models are currently sitting in a box unused.
Sisters of Silence

Pros:
- Painting the heads separately worked great.
- The metal colour came out excellently by just tweaking my original formula and adding purple.
- Drybrushing the fur part of the cloaks ended up with a really nice effect for little work.

Cons:
- I needed to paint the
flamers in a differentcolour as they blend into the miniature when viewed from the front. - I’m unlikely to ever use these in a game.
- My bases now look very mundane in comparison to the Stormcast Eternals.

Conclusions:
- Get a usable army worked out on paper first.
- Test the
colour scheme on spare models. - Get feedback from Instagram / Reddit / CMON before moving on.
- Put models together in sub-assemblies for ease of painting.
- Apply the base colour with spray cans or an airbrush.
- Use transfers as much as possible to add details.
- Apply shading with ninja washes or pigments to save chunks of time.
- Focus all time-consuming pin washes and edge highlighting only on areas that are going to stand out.
- Airbrush basic gradients onto large flat surfaces to save even more time.
- Assemble the bases separately to avoid getting the materials on the miniatures.
The bonus after-credits bit they do in Marvel movies…
Thanks to the Bolter and Chainsword’s Space Marines Painter here and a list of hex codes for all the Citadel Paints here I knocked up a quick prototype of a simple colour scheme that matches my specifications.
